Mindfulness can be like a gatekeeper

Mindfulness teaches us a way of being that clearly recognizes the potentially destructive power of some of the habit patterns and moods that assail the mind and then acts to protect the mind. Mindfulness reveals the way that rumination, anxiety, aversion, dissociation, and identification serve to create distress, diminished capacity, and negative self-view. Through simple awareness, we explore the landscape of our mind, becoming intimate with the familiar and repetitive habits that undermine well-being so that we can begin to use our attention to choose what we allow into awareness and what we keep out of awareness. This is not easy: there is a curious tension of wanting these habits to end, yet also being enchanted by or almost addicted to them.

There is an ancient simile of the gatekeeper of a city, whose job it is to meet all visitors. The gatekeeper recognizes and welcomes the visitors to the city who are helpful and beneficial, and turns away those who mean the city harm. 

The gatekeeper would be wise, competent, and intelligent, one who keeps out strangers and admits acquaintances. While he is walking along the path that encircles the city he could not see a cleft or an opening in the walls big enough for a cat to slip through. He might think, “Whatever large creatures enter or leave this city, all enter and leave through this one gate.” (Bhikkhu Bodhi, 2005; SN 47:12; V 159-61) 

Protective awareness requires discernment, of knowing who the residents of the city are, who are visitors, who intend benefit, and who intend harm. This can seem to be at odds with mainstream mindfulness-based applications that so strongly emphasize the nonjudgmental and inclusive nature of mindfulness. In Buddhist psychology, a judging mind inevitably creates struggle and distress. Judging and discernment, however, are two different processes. Mindfulness, in Buddhist psychology, emphasizes developing and strengthening our capacity for discernment as the basis of an ethical life and the bridge to skillful responsiveness. 

Discernment is not concerned primarily with worse and better, right and wrong, good and bad, worthy or unworthy, but rather is supported by simple awareness. For example, if we walked down the street and witnessed a vulnerable person fall down, simple knowing would enable us to clearly perceive the event. Merely observing his or her plight would not, of course, help the injured person. Consider Mohammed, a man living with chronic pain. If he sees the sensations of pain clearly in his awareness but has no sense of agency or choice, then this is of little help. Discernment registers the pain and leads us to make skillful choices, to address our own and other people’s distress. The moment when someone recovering from addiction knows s/he is on the point of relapse and phones their sponsor is a moment of discernment. The moment Mohammed sees his pain spiraling into a sense of catastrophizing and hopelessness is a moment of discernment. Mindfulness is thus dynamic, engaging with experience in ways that are rooted in knowing what leads to distress and what leads to the end of distress. 

Discernment can be learned. When we are engaged in cultivating mindfulness of the body, we might feel the familiar pull of habits (such as aversion, rumination, and shame). Instead of letting our attention become lost in our negative patterns, we can return to a place of knowing the body as the body, a thought as a thought. This is the function of protective awareness. Protective awareness is different from avoidance or suppression, which are patterns rooted in aversion, avoidance, or fear. Instead of turning away and dissociating from difficult experiences, protective awareness helps us fully know present-moment experience, so that we can choose not to engage in patterns that create and re-create distress. The moment Mohammed acknowledges an awareness of painful sensations by applying some well-chosen stretches will provide some quick relief from the stabbing, searing sensations. This is an alternative to the well-worn ruts of physical contraction, hopelessness, and catastrophizing.

The tendency of the human mind to blame, shame, judge, ruminate, and/or simply want things to be different from what they are, is powerful, repetitive, personal, and universal with predictable painful outcomes. These tendencies or habits can directly contribute to mental ill health. There is even evidence that anxiety and depression, and the tendency to worry and ruminate, can be passed from generation to generation. There may be much we are asked to understand about these distress patterns, yet that understanding is rarely borne of more rumination. Protective mindfulness is not a process of pushing away the unwelcome, but simply learning that we do not need to live in a way in which we are repetitively overwhelmed by it. It also may help us end the cycle of unhelpful thought patterns that are passed down from generation to generation.

Extract from Christina Feldman and Willem Kuyken (2019) Mindfulness: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Psychology, Guilford Press.